Why can't real helicopters be controlled like drones?

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MountainDude

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MountainDude
Flying a drone is super easy, and I hear flying helicopters is not. Why not make helicopters with the same control system as drones? Just curious.
 
MountainDude said:
Flying a drone is super easy, and I hear flying helicopters is not. Why not make helicopters with the same control system as drones? Just curious.
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Isn't this similar to saying flying an RC plane is easy; why can't we make flying a Boeing 777 with the same control system? ;)
 
Too broad of a statement. Some radio controlled aircraft or “drones” are easy, others not. Some helicopters are hard to fly hands on, others not.

An R22 doesn’t have a “beginner mode” where you press a button and it stays at a hover. Larger aircraft like a UH-60M can be flown at a 10 ft hover without touching the controls. A helicopter by its nature is unstable, so it will require constant pilot attention or a stabilization / auto pilot to make it stable...easy to fly.

I suppose at some point your conventional helicopter will be replaced with a electric VTOL system like the new Bell Nexus, but until then, we all got to start at the bottom and use both hands and both feet.
 
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't actually "fly" the low end drones, the "toys", right? The quad-copter thingys? No aerodynamic skills or true piloting required? You just "direct" them up down, left-right?
 
Are you talking about the drones you unpack, charge, drag your fingers on a map to create a “flight plan”, set “home” and push fly?

Eventually, once self-driving cars are figured out, we will get human-sized flying drones that do exactly that. It’s gonna take another 50 years or so to get there.
 
Early designs of what you'd call 'drones', were in fact extremely hard to fly. Newer models have gyros built in that compensate for wind, torque, etc. A heli with a similar level of automation would be similarly easy to fly. Integrating that in a full size heli would obviously be much harder than using a computer to mix 4 electronic speed controls.
 
overdrive148 said:
Not everyone can be a drone pilot! :cool:
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Exactly. My reply was targeted to a specific individual who is not on POA. But I sent him a link. While I think he's one of the best stick wigglers out there, he can barely make his grandson's remote car go in a straight line let alone work his garage door opener properly.:eek2:
 
MountainDude said:
Flying a drone is super easy, and I hear flying helicopters is not. Why not make helicopters with the same control system as drones? Just curious.
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The systems to implement drone-like 'flying qualities' [sic :)] are not particularly challenging given the state of the art. What makes it a challenge is how to manage, test, and validate all of the potential failure modes both in a conventional helicopter and ones added by the incorporation of new sensors, actuators, processor(s), code, etc. So far it's still more cost-effective to have a bio-mechanical primary actuator that include attitude and rate sensing, optical sensors, audio i/o and real-time adaptive/reconfigurable control laws...or as you might know it, a 'pilot', to manage the stability augmentation and failure modes. For the time being, anyway :)

Nauga,
the primary motivator
 
nauga said:
The systems to implement drone-like 'flying qualities' [sic :)] are not particularly challenging given the state of the art. What makes it a challenge is how to manage, test, and validate all of the potential failure modes both in a conventional helicopter and ones added by the incorporation of new sensors, actuators, processor(s), code, etc. So far it's still more cost-effective to have a bio-mechanical primary actuator that include attitude and rate sensing, optical sensors, audio i/o and real-time adaptive/reconfigurable control laws...or as you might know it, a 'pilot', to manage the stability augmentation and failure modes. For the time being, anyway :)

Nauga,
the primary motivator
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hey! It's Mr. @Velocity173 to you sir, and he'll show ya a thing or two those fancy electronic sensors cannot :D
 
hindsight2020 said:
hey! It's Mr. @Velocity173 to you sir, and he'll show ya a thing or two those fancy electronic sensors cannot :D
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I could watch that vid a hundred times and I would still laugh out loud each time. It just never gets old.

It also disapproves the OP’s assertion that flying a helicopter is not easy. Hogg did a fine job for a first solo. Last time I saw a helicopter perform gyrations like that, it had a Red Bull on the side of it!
 
They could be. Why do it?
MountainDude said:
Flying a drone is super easy, and I hear flying helicopters is not. Why not make helicopters with the same control system as drones? Just curious.
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Why make full sized helicopters if there will be no pilots?

BTW, there are several autonomous quad copters under deverlopment for short transit runs. So the answer is “they are” but it is under limited circumstances.
 
That makes sense. Thank you.

nauga said:
The systems to implement drone-like 'flying qualities' [sic :)] are not particularly challenging given the state of the art. What makes it a challenge is how to manage, test, and validate all of the potential failure modes both in a conventional helicopter and ones added by the incorporation of new sensors, actuators, processor(s), code, etc. So far it's still more cost-effective to have a bio-mechanical primary actuator that include attitude and rate sensing, optical sensors, audio i/o and real-time adaptive/reconfigurable control laws...or as you might know it, a 'pilot', to manage the stability augmentation and failure modes. For the time being, anyway :)

Nauga,
the primary motivator
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Just to clarify, I was referring to a DJI Mavic Pro drone. It is so easy to fly it, I am impressed.
 
I have several Drones "Quadcopters". Some are really hard to fly. No Self leveling, return home, GPS, ect ect. Take some skill but are fun to fly. Then I have ones my wife can fly with zero stick time under her belt. GPS, Return Home, Self Leveling, hands off hovering. Boring for me to fly but she loves it. She thinks shes a pro at flying knowing very little all the computer components keeping her from crashing and balling it up.
 
GRG55 said:
Isn't this similar to saying flying an RC plane is easy; why can't we make flying a Boeing 777 with the same control system? ;)
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It is. And, you'll notice, as we've added more and more automation to passenger jets that the safety record has gotten better and better.

It's easy to look at MCAS, light up the tiki torches and march on washington yelling "no more automation". But in real life, automation is a huge party of why commercial aviation has gotten so much better over the years.
 
MountainDude said:
Flying a drone is super easy, and I hear flying helicopters is not. Why not make helicopters with the same control system as drones? Just curious.
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They could be, they should be, they will be. The pilot will then be telling the computers what to do, and the computers will respond, within the design flight envelope. Everything exists today, except for the market that will pay the tens of millions, or more, to get it certified on a single airframe.
 
Helicopters have lots of forces that are deeply intertwingled. When you raise the collective, the airplane rises but also torques, so you had a little pedal, the pedal input now causes the aircraft to translate a little to the side, so you add a little cyclic to counter, .... Sikorsky spent a lot of time trying to counter balance the adverse effects.

Years ago I worked in a related activity to the Army Human Engineering Laboratory (HEL) I was working for the Ballistic Research Lab, so one of our slogans was "blown to HEL by BRL." They did a computer fly-by-wire project that totally decoupled all the helicopter inputs. You pulled the collective, you went up. You pushed the cyclic you went in that direction. You pushed a pedal, you turned. All the adverse effects were dealt with automatically. The interesting thing is that the real helicopter pilots couldn't fly the thing. They were so ingrained in making the corrections that they "over" corrected when flying one without the adverse effects.
 
Mechanical mixing unit (MMU). Like an Ercoupe aileron rudder interconnect...only for helicopters. ;)
 
flyingron said:
The interesting thing is that the real helicopter pilots couldn't fly the thing.
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Years ago, Sikorsky installed a 2nd cockpit on the front of a S-76 to test a FBW/FBL control system. They used one control for all flight axis. While they learned a few things it didn't make it to production. However, the S-97 Defiant has some of that technology in it. Fast forward to the Bell 525 and it will be the 1st FBW civilian helicopter. But they kept the 3 separate inputs, except that the cyclic and collective are side sticks and not conventional controls.
flyingron said:
The interesting thing is that the real helicopter pilots couldn't fly the thing.
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And on the opposite side of things, when the Marines got the 1st Harriers, their leading jet jocks were dinging them up when transitioning into "jump" mode. So they brought in a dozen helicopter pilots who could manage the hover side and taught them to be jet pilots.
 
flyingron said:
The interesting thing is that the real helicopter pilots couldn't fly the thing. They were so ingrained in making the corrections that they "over" corrected when flying one without the adverse effects.
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Or put another way..."We took pilots familiar with the flight characteristics of one helicopter and put them in another with completely different characteristics and were surprised when they found it difficult to fly."

Nauga,
a student of Cooper and Harper
 
There are a lot of books by helo pilots that talk about their primary training. None explains it better or is funnier than Chicken Hawk.
 
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